Axie Infinity (AXS)

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Historical price evolution of Axie Infinity

Daily historical data. Updated automatically.

Axie Infinity was born between 2017 and 2018 when Trung Nguyen, CEO and former CTO of Vietnamese e-commerce startup Lozi.vn and Vietnam's representative at the ACM-ICPC World Final 2014, joined Aleksander Larsen, former security officer of the Norwegian government, competitive DotA 2 player and national representative in Warcraft 3, together with Tu Doan, Jeffrey Zirlin and Andy Ho to found Sky Mavis in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. The project's inspiration combined the game mechanics of CryptoKitties with elements of Pokémon, with the objective of creating an NFT creature game where players had real ownership of blockchain assets.

In 2018, Sky Mavis launched the first playable versions of Axie Infinity on the Ethereum blockchain. A year later, in November 2019, the company raised approximately 1.5 million dollars to accelerate the game's development. In November 2020, the AXS (Axie Infinity Shards) token was launched as an ERC-20 on Ethereum, with a total supply of 270 million AXS, establishing a two-token system: AXS for governance and long-term value, and SLP (Smooth Love Potion) as a daily gameplay reward.

In February 2021, Sky Mavis launched the Ronin Wallet and migrated Axie Infinity from Ethereum to Ronin, a proprietary EVM sidechain built specifically for gaming that allowed almost instantaneous transactions without gas fees. During 2021, the play-to-earn model experienced an explosion during the pandemic, reaching more than 2.7 million daily active users, especially players in the Philippines, Vietnam and Venezuela who used Axie as their primary source of income. The AXS token reached its all-time high of approximately 165 dollars in November 2021, whilst Axie NFT sales exceeded 4,300 million dollars accumulated, including the sale of virtual land for 2.3 million dollars.

On 23rd March 2022, the North Korean hacker group Lazarus Group (APT38) compromised the Ronin Network validators, stealing 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDC, equivalent to approximately 620 million dollars. Sky Mavis took 6 days to detect the attack, which was subsequently attributed by the FBI to North Korea, leading the United States Treasury to sanction the addresses involved. During 2022, the economic model collapsed with a drop in users from 2.7 million to approximately 250,000, whilst AXS lost more than 97% of its maximum value and SLP fell 99%.

Between 2024 and 2026, Sky Mavis pivoted towards the play-to-own (P2O) model with the launch of Axie Origins, a free game without mandatory NFT. In January 2026, bAXS was launched to reduce selling pressure from rewards. During this period, the platform maintained more than 100,000 daily active unique wallets and more than 1 million on-chain transactions per day on the Ronin network.

Axie Infinity functions as a Web3 gaming ecosystem built on Ronin, a layer 1 blockchain compatible with Ethereum Virtual Machine that Sky Mavis developed specifically for gaming applications. The core of the system are the Axies, NFT digital creatures inspired by axolotls that possess unique characteristics determining their performance in combat. The main game, Axie Origins, features turn-based card battles where teams of three Axies compete in both player versus environment (PvE) and player versus player (PvP) modes, being free-to-play since 2022.

The ecosystem's economy operates through three differentiated tokens: AXS (ERC-20 token for protocol governance and voting on the Community Treasury), SLP (Smooth Love Potion, daily reward token without fixed supply required for Axie breeding), and bAXS (locked version of AXS introduced in 2026 to reduce selling pressure from rewards). The breeding system establishes that each Axie can reproduce only a maximum of seven times, creating controlled scarcity. AXS token holders exercise voting rights over game modifications and community treasury distribution, whilst Ronin processes transactions with minimal fees and near-instant confirmations, enabling microtransactions that would be economically unviable on Ethereum's main network.

Data verified against external sources. Some values may have changed since the last update.